The Daily Wrap: October 17th

It’s Thursday, and that means the day of Thor! This has nothing to do with the Avengers. There is no Iron Man day, incidentally. Anyway, on with the news.

The Shut Down is Over

Congratulations, America! You have a semi-functional government again! We could go into the deal that was reached and who did what but at this point, meh. No one is changing their ideologies at this point, everyone still blames the same people, no one learned anything. On to the next story, maybe it’s funny!

Grand Theft Pocket Change

Bellefontaine, Ohio is a serious town. A woman who had lost her job plucked $2.87 out of a fountain when a cop asked her what she was doing. Her plan was to buy lunch, and some food for her cats. The cop searched her, because people near fountains are suspicious and need to be frisked, and found the change on her. He issued her a summons and charged her with petty theft.

Court documents list the town as the victim in the case, because Bellefontaine is apparently also really depending on fountain money to keep things running properly, while at least one person in town is trying to raise some money to help the woman out and raise awareness as well that she’s a woman with mental health issues who is jobless, almost homeless and wanted a snack, not a master criminal.

South Park Misses an Episode

Noteworthy for being a historical first, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have missed their deadline for the first time in the show’s 17 seasons and a new episode was not produced in time to air. Unlike most cartoons which can take months to produce after being voiced and drawn and sent to Asia for coloring and all that jazz, South Park is produced from start to finish in 6 days, which is how the show stays remarkably topical. Unfortunately, after a power outage in the studio, the latest episode was sidetracked and unable to finish in time. In the grand scheme of things, this means very little, but it’s still interesting to note and kind of cool that, for 17 seasons, they’ve cranked out episodes on that insane schedule and this was the first time something went wrong.

Computer Blackmail

Have you heard of RATs? Remote Administration Tools allow someone to control things like your microphone and webcam from another computer. What’s the point? Well, if you’re nefarious, 99% of the time you’re going to use it to watch some girl through her webcam in the hopes you’ll see her naked some day and make a video of it. That last 1% is for people who watch anyone in the hopes of seeing something embarrassing and then blackmailing the person they watched, which is what happened to 17 year old Hector Hernandez. Someone in the Philippines sent Hector a message warning that they’d share a video they made if he didn’t send them money. What was on the video? Something embarrassing enough that Hector, in his wisdom, stole $100,000 worth of jewelry and antiques from his parents to a pawn shop where he traded it all for $1,500. He sent the money to the blackmailer and, surprise, the guy wanted even more money. It was at this point Hector told his parents, who called the cops.

No Biggie Smalls Corner

Someone in Brooklyn started a petition to have a street corner named after rapper Notorious B.I.G. Turns out, however, not everyone is on board with such a plan. Why ever not, you might ask. What could be bad about honoring a slain rapper in his own neighborhood? Well it turns out not everyone appreciates that Biggie started selling drugs at 12 years old, that he continued to sell drugs for much of his life, that he referred to women as hoes and such in his music, that he was known to be basically a violent thug. Also he was fat. Someone tossed that in at the end of their rundown of all the things that were wrong with him and that, oddly, is the only thing the article we’re linking focused on in the headline. They won’t name a corner after Biggie because he was fat. Not because he was an abrasive criminal or anything like that. Just because he was a fatty. And you thought we sucked at reporting the news.